Last week I covered an interesting topic that brought back the appetite for these type of posts. I love statistics, it's part of my work and drop a related post from time to time, but not many are interested unfortunately. Well, regardless, today I'm back with another one, as I find the topic interesting.
Today we're going to talk about Human Development Index (HDI) by Country, which is very important for everyone, but I don't think many have any idea where their country stands.
When it comes to Human Development Index, you don't just want to be above average, you want to be in the top, among the best and growing year by year, otherwise I have bad news for you, which is why I'm going to show you data from two different years, so you can see where that specific country is heading.
But before we start, let me drop you the definition of human development and how it is calculated.
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development published by the United Nations. It is calculated by normalizing and combining three core indicators: long and healthy life (health), knowledge (education), and a decent standard of living (income) (source: AI)
These three things are connected in one way or another and with AI gaining more and more ground, research is easier than before (ok, it still needs to be financed, but we have so many new and precise ways to test everything), development should be clearly visible in case of each country. But is it? Let's have a look.
This map should give you a general idea about how things stand and if it surprises you, it means you need to update your knowledge.
I want to be fair and not just pick the data that fits my story, so I decided to showcase the evolution, rather just take one year of data. This is why you have data from 2023, which is the latest, then you have 2020 and 2010 as well, so you can see where the particular country is going and the speed as well.
For me, or should I say, for us, Europeans, it's not a surprise to see Nordic countries leading the list and not only that, but look at the speed they are evolving with. It's lovely to see that out of the top 14 countries, only 3 are not European. Don't bite my head off for this, I'm just interpreting the data. These countries have the highest index and their HDI is marked as Very High.
I skipped the rest of the list with very high index and jumped to where things change a little. This is where the index changes from very High to High and Iran is first. This was a bit of a surprise ad we know Iran has been dealing with a lot of difficulties and I'm wondering how they have managed to score this high.
At this section you need to pay attention how the numbers change and you can see that some countries not only have stagnated for a decade, but went slightly back in development. This is definitely not what anyone would want but it happens.
Look at Azerbaijan, who's index was 0.733 in 2010 and went back to 0.722 in 2020. This means ten years wasted and all they got is making things worse. What gives you a little hope is that things seem to have changed and made a huge progress in the next three years, scoring an index of 0.789.
When I started my post, I had a few countries in mind, especially those that have a large representation on Hive. One is Cuba for the obvious reasons and there you go, you have the data here. Cuba managed to score 0.779 in 2010, after which in ten years they did everything they could to bring back the country to the Stone Age and score 0.759. This is a huge slap on the population's face and a waste of human life and effort. They jumped to 0.761 in 2023, but is still miles away from where they were in 2010. Today the situation is even worse and I wouldn't be surprised to see Cuba somewhere around some African countries that are closer to the bottom. It's rather sad.
Nauru is the last country marked as having High HDI, but the country I want to point out in this list is obviously Venezuela. Going from 0.759 in 2010 to 0.691 in just a decade tells you where most of the government efforts are concentrated and I can assure you it is not towards making life for the voters better. They made some progress till 2023, but could still not reach the level they had in 2010 and we all know the situation has worsened since then.
Among the countries marked with Medium Index, I'd like to point out the top 3 for different reasons. The top two is kind of the same in my eyes, India and Bangladesh unfortunately are not shining and have a long way to catch up with the rest of the world. While I can't deny, there's development, it is too slow to catapult them to a honorable place.
The third country is a different category. El Salvador used to be in the same category as the other Central and South American countries ruled by gangs, drug lords and corruption, but things have changed when Nayib Bukele took office in 2019. You can say a lot of things about him, some are accusing him of dictatorship but this guy took matters in his own hand, cleaned up the streets and turned life around. It takes time to change what it is so broken, but they are getting there and if there will be someone to continue the work Bukele started, you're going to see El Salvador ranking way higher in a few years.
I can't finish without mentioning the country with a large representation on Hive and that is Nigeria. As you can see, Nigeria made the bottom of the list among countries with Medium Index. Now obviously you can spin this the way you want and say Medium is not so bad, but when their index is half of the one ranking first, you can imagine where they stand.
Pakistan is not any better, even worse as they made the Low index category and chances to see them higher in a few years are slim to none in my very honest and brutal opinion.
Obviously no one wants to live in countries sitting at the bottom of the list and this ranking can give you an idea where life is better, but that doesn't mean you have a chance to get a citizenship there.
Another thing to take into consideration when extrapolating data in order to anticipate future evolution is migration and those countries foolishly opening their borders to everyone, without filtering people, and won't ship home those who are not contributing to growing the society, are going to end up in lower positions I can guarantee you that.
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